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Jettisoning the Journal
When Fred Hewitt retired, at age seventy in 1945, after more
than three decades as editor of The Machinists Monthly Journal,
his successor, Lee Thomas, made the mistake of challenging Harvey
Brown over a relatively minor matter involving editorial policy. As
an elected officer, Thomas assumed he would be able to exercise as
much independence as Hewitt had enjoyed. But time had changed and
Thomas' challenge gave Harvey Brown one more reason to favor a
weekly newspaper more in tune with the times and an editor who could
be kept on a tighter leash. Once the Machinist began
publishing, Thomas must have realized that sooner or later the
leadership would choose between it and the Journal since even
an organization as thriving as the IAM could not afford both weekly
and monthly publications. Thomas was at a disadvantage in the fight
for survival. As a former business representative from Grand Rapids
he was bright enough. However, he had no particular qualifications
for editing a major union magazine. Long before he came to Grand
Lodge he showered Hewitt with folksy articles expounding his
philosophy on life, trade unionism and other weighty subjects. But
Thomas was more prolific than talented and when it came to putting
out a publication for a modern day readership he was little more
than an earnest amateur. This became apparent when Gordon Cole, and
experienced and talented professional, became editor of The
Machinist. Cole soon created one of the best written,
best-laid-out labor papers in America.
Thomas did his best to keep the Journal in the running
by modernizing the layout, expanding the page size, adding color and
generally trying to put more zip into the sober old Journal.
But he never quite made it. Possibly no one could in the face of
radio, television, movies and other diversions that decreased the
reading time of most Americans, including most union members. The
old-time craftsman may have had the patience to study pages of
closely set type and time to digest a Journal that mixed
economics and philosophy with shop notes and technical information.
By the mid '50's, however, the IAM had many more specialists than
journeymen. The proud railroad machinists, once the backbone of the
union, were disappearing as rapidly as the industry they served. The
younger and more transient aircraft mechanics, auto mechanics and
airframe workers who replaced them in the ranks were more likely to
glance quickly through the Machinist than sit down for hours
with the Journal.
When Thomas died, after a long bout with cancer, in November
1954, Hayes tapped GLR William Dameron to take his place. Dameron
was soft-spoken former business representative from Philadelphia who
was warned at the start that the was merely a temporary stand-in,
that the Executive Council intended to recommend the Journal
be abolished at the '56 Grand Lodge Convention.
By the time the delegates got to San Francisco the Journal
had been cut back to six issues a year. When word got out that the
Publication Committee was planning to recommend that it be
discontinued many delegates were dismayed. Some went to
Dameron and begged him to lead a fight to save the Journal.
Since he had known the Journal's days were numbered even
before he took over as editor he refused to join the challenge that
was being planned.
In its report the Publications Committee noted, "Changing
times requires different tools and . . . we are convinced that more
of our members and more of the wives and husbands of members read
our newspaper than read the Journal." In the debate that
followed the hall was drenched with nostalgia. Delegates wistfully
remembered how the Journal had laid "in a place of
honor" in machinists' homes, how members had kept it "in
the libraries of their homes for their children" and how it had
been passed on to friends and relations. Finally Hayes asked the
convention's consent to make a statement. Indulging in a little
nostalgia of his own, Hayes pointed out that he had been a member
for almost 40 years and fully understood that the Journal "was
one of the sentimental sign posts in this organization." But he
went on to explain matter-of-factly, that while the Journal
"served a good purpose during its lifetime, in today's United
Sates and Canada the media . . . have changed." He explained
that even as a bi-monthly the Journal was costing the IAM
$500,000 a year. He concluded that despite emotional and sentimental
attachments such an expense was difficult to justify from a
practical standpoint. In the voice vote that followed the delegates
permitted the Journal to die.
For many years it had served the union well. Under Hewitt the
Journal had substance, a tough, gritty, honest,
dirt-under-the-fingernails quality that validated it as a
publication by machinists, of machinists and for machinists. But in
its last decade and a half, beginning with the wartime rationing of
newsprint, the Journal slowly declined both in quality and
influence.
Members were assured The Machinist would fill the void
left after the Journal was killed off. And though a weekly
newspaper could not achieve the depth the Journal once
achieved under Hewitt, The Machinist continues to be one of
the most respected and widely honored union publications.
Unfortunately it, too, eventually fell victim to changing times. Due
to skyrocketing postage and publishing costs it had to be converted
to a monthly tabloid in the early 1970's.
Checking the Right-to-Work Plague
In 1944 Florida was the first state to legislate the
compulsory open shop. Since the NLRA authorized union security
clauses in collectively bargained contracts there was initially some
doubt as to the validity of the Florida statute. But the
Taft-Hartley Act included a section--14(b)--that settled the doubt
by giving states the right to outlaw the union shop. By hamstringing
unions in states where they were weakest and most needed Section
14(b) proved to be the part of Taft-Hartley most damaging to the
labor movement.
When the validity of state bans on union security was
certified by Taft-Hartley, a fever of anti-unionism swept the South
and spread to a number of farming states in the Midwest. Although
the purpose of right-to-work laws was to cripple unions by requiring
every shop to be an open shop this motive was concealed by
fraudulent mislabeling. Someone with a flair for false advertising
termed the compulsory open shop a "right-to-work." While
union representatives tried to explain the phoniness of the label
industry flacks equated right-to-work laws with motherhood and apple
pie.
By 1955 seventeen states had compulsory open shop laws though
none were in the industrial states where union members could vote in
sizable numbers. Despite the best efforts of big business lobbyists,
these laws were limited to rural and southern states.
In February 1955 The Machinist reported that a group of
corporate executives had established a Nation Right-to-Work
Committee (NRTW). Former Congressman Fred Hartley, of Taft-Hartley
notoriety, was named president. In the following months The Machinist
kept a watchful eye on right-to-work developments in sixteen
states--California, Colorado, Connecticut, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas,
Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Montana, Ohio, Utah,
Washington, West Virginia and Wisconsin.
Business and industry lobbyists put pressure on legislators in
all these states but the labor movement was better prepared than in
the first right-to-work blitz in 1947. Along with the rest of the
labor press The Machinist made sure IAM members fully
understood the magnitude of the threat to their wages and working
conditions. Editor Gordon Cole asked a priest, minister and rabbi to
measure so-called right-to-work laws against the moral standards set
by the nation's three major theologies. The result was a series of
memorable studies exposing the fundamental immorality of compulsory
open shop legislation. The IAM distributed thousands of reprints, in
the form of a fifty-five page booklet called Right-to-Work: Three
Moral Studies, the state legislators, clergymen, newspapers and
other opinion-makers. The Three Moral Studies also armed IAM
GLR's and business representatives with arguments refuting open shop
advocates in public debate or letters to the editor.
The American Civil Liberties Union warned "that
'right-to-work' laws may be interpreted as an invitation to continue
the denial of free speech and assembly to labor unions." After
starting out strong early in the year the National Right-to-Work
Committee's campaign generally fizzled. Once the unions got their
members aware and roused, Utah became the only state to enact a
compulsory open shop law in 1955. The Kansas legislature, dominated
by the Farm Bureau, passed such a law, but lacked the votes needed
to override Governor Fred Hall's veto.
The National Right-to-Work Committee's failure in 1955 showed
that where union members formed the nucleus for an aroused voting
bloc, most state legislators were reluctant to stir them up with the
right-to-work issue. Open shop advocates had to look for a different
strategy. Since they couldn't get right-to-work laws through state
legislatures, they decided to go directly to the voters by way of
initiatives and referenda. They set out to test this strategy in
Washington State early in 1956. In February The Machinist
reported that the state's right-to-work committee had asked the
Attorney General to approve the title "Protecting Freedom of
Employment" for their proposed initiative. He dealt them an
early setback by ruling such a title misleading. He re-titled it
"Restricting Employer-Employee Agreements."
When the campaign opened the Right-to-Work Committee was
confident of success. The labor movement was relatively strong in
the state--the Machinists alone had some 20,000 members at
Boeing--but in a referendum of all the voters union members would be
a decided minority. The open shop advocates also expected Eisenhower
to sweep the state and were sure most Eisenhower voters would be
anti-union.
With the largest contingent of organized labor in the state,
District 751 was crucial to the counter-attack. President and DBR
Harold Gibson learned the Right-to-Work Committee planned to collect
50,000 signatures (needed to put the question on the ballot) by
mailing out 800,000 petitions with postage-guaranteed return
envelopes. When these petitions were in the mail the Washington
State Machinists Council ran large newspaper ads headed
"DANGER!" The ads explained that the underlying purpose of
the Right-to-Work petition was to weaken unions and destroy union
protections. This was followed by a second ad labeled "BEWARE
THE ONSTER IN YOU MAIL BOX."
Though the AFL and CIO had recently merged at the national
level, in many states, including Washington, AFL and CIO unions were
still operating separately. The 1956 open shop referendum served as
a catalyst for unity. The Machinists, Longshoremen, Carpenters,
Railroad Brotherhoods, Woodworkers, and other AFL and CIO unions
formed a United Labor Advisory Committee to plan and coordinate
strategy statewide. The labor movement set out to show that the
so-called right-to-work would hurt everyone, not just union
members. Unions distributed more than 200,000 bumper
stickers--"Don't Wreck Your State: Reject 198"--along with
tens of thousands of lapel buttons. The slogan blossomed on
billboards, posters and placards placed in the windows of homes and
businesses. A group called The Committee for the Preservation of
Payrolls prepared a speakers' manual titled "Brother It's Up To
You," which addressed legal, moral, political, economic, social
and historical issues in the right-to-work debate. Every union in
the state directed educational programs to their own members. In
this effort District 751 profited from lessons learned in repelling
the Teamsters 1949 raid at Boeing. The district set up seminars for
members, trained speakers and distributed thousands of pamphlets
from door to door.
Shortly before election day the Right-to-Work Committee
blanketed the state with an expensive, last-minute advertising
blitz. Newspaper ads, telephone calls and radio spots were all part
of a professionally orchestrated campaign to persuade Washington
voters that the right-to-work initiative would help union members
without hurting unions. District 751 countered with a huge,
televised get-out-the-vote rally in Seattle.
Most of the state's political establishment, including Senator
Henry Jackson and candidates for governor and Congress from both
parties, paraded to the dais to denounce the right-to-work fraud. As
one of the principal speakers, Al Hayes stressed that the
initiative's sponsors were not concerned with anyone's right to work
either decently or at all. He warned they were using a fine-sounding
phrase to camouflage a proven method of union-busting. He assured
listeners that the purpose of the right-to-work campaign was to
limit the gains unions make for union and non-union workers alike.
During the balloting tens of thousands of union members stood
or marched outside polling places bearing placards that repeated the
slogan "Don't Wreck Your State, Vote Against 198."
Washington's voters buried Initiative 198 by more than two to
one--704,000 to 329,000. The right-to-workers failed to achieve
their main goal but succeeded in deflecting union energies from
collective bargaining to costly, time-consuming defensive action.
Two years later they would be back for another try.
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